A Coventry business has had to make five staff members redundant after their crooked accounts officer stole more than £400,000 to finance her “champagne lifestyle”.

Calculating Julie Lydall even stole £3,000 the day after her bosses at Delta Energy Services had given her a pay rise above the company’s normal parameters.

She even managed to cover up her dishonesty when auditors were brought in – but was finally caught after another check was carried out while she was off sick.

Lydall, 53, of Boyd Close, Woodway Park, Coventry, who had already been jailed twice for thefts from employers, is again behind bars after being sentenced to five years after pleading guilty at Warwick Crown Court to eight charges of fraud.

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What did the prosecution say?

Prosecutor Justin Jarmola said that in 2001 Lydall had been jailed for nine months after stealing around £25,000 from her then-employer over a three-year period.

In 2007 she was jailed for 21 months for stealing just under £66,000 from her next employer over a 16-month period.

Following her release from that sentence in 2008, she applied for a job with Delta Energy Services without disclosing her convictions and claiming she had no references because she had not worked for the previous four years.

She began work as an accounts assistant and in 2010 her duties increased and she was made responsible for the accounts, which gave her access to the company’s bank account to process payments to staff and contractors.

Delta Energy Services in Coventry

In March 2017 an extended audit was carried out, during which there was “a large amount of liaison between her and the auditors, and she provided information which balanced the books”, said Mr Jarmola.

But Lydall then went on a period of absence through ill health and when a further review of the accounts took place, around 150 unauthorised transactions were discovered.

It emerged that Lydall had been producing false invoices from non-existent contractors and then making the payments into her own account.

Beginning in 2010 when she diverted £22,403 in that way, the amounts she stole increased year on year - with £106,271 stolen in 2016.

By the time she went off sick in April this year, she had already transferred a further £76,034 – which Mr Jarmola said took the total she had stolen to a staggering £446,184.

As a result, the previously profitable company had to record losses in the last financial year and were likely to have to do so again this year.